BUSINESS BLOGS
BUSINESS BLOGS
category: business
23 Nov 2008

From NYTimes:

After college, Michael Eisner briefly sought the life of a playwright before settling on the corporate media world, working his way up through ABC and Paramount. He became chief executive of Disney in 1984.

Today, without shareholders to worry about, he is driven by his creative impulses and an almost messianic belief that movies and TV shows and videos are more valuable in the long run than the pipes over which they are delivered.

“It’s always the content that defines the platform,” he says. Now the platform owners are “being arrogant and saying, ‘we’re it,’” he adds. “But eventually exclusive content wins out.”

Then he gives an important caveat: The content must be professionally produced as well as exclusive. “How many skateboarding cats can there be?” he says.

After nearly 3 years, 700 hours of filmed material and over 4,000 videos, here are the two things I think are most important about a media company’s video content strategy:

- the cost of creation has to be kept in check;
- the content needs to be evergreen, or at least have a long shelf life.

Everything else is a detail that can be tweaked to make the content a winner… but if either one of those two is off, it won’t succeed.  Then again, I don’t have $333M to finance my content company (what Eisner had when he left Disney), but I digress.

Regarding the following:

Like his counterpart, Mr. Diller, Mr. Eisner is at pains to offer a unifying vision for the different companies he has in his portfolio.

“There is a method to my madness, but it’s hard to define,” says Mr. Eisner, who explained that eventually the assets would fit together as one media company.

I don’t think it needs to come together in a grand unifying theory.  What matters is some kind of synergy where some of the parts help others.  Within our company, the core focus is on WatchMojo.com, for sure.  So using Mojo Supreme as an example, we use every other unit to reinforce WatchMojo.com’s leadership position in the marketplace.

- The number of media professionals that got to know about WatchMojo.com via this blog or other blogs in our blog network BloggerMojo.com for example is considerable.  It also helps us in other ways, like aggregating or linking to content that we want to cover, promote, mention or reference without actually spending the resources to create a video for.  Other blogs, be it SoundMojo.com, ArcadeMojo.com or FlickMojo.com also helps us establish ties with record labels, movie studios and gamemakers respectively that in turn help make WatchMojo.com’s music, film and video game videos of much better quality.

- We can better serve marketers who promote contests via StreetMojo.com, and in turn cross promote pertinent videos alongside those contents…

- Search was a bit of a different story.  I’ve covered that quite a bit on this blog back in the day.  Click on the MetaMojo.com tag if you care to learn the method to the madness there.

The point being: I don’t mind sharing all of these “trade secrets” because, well, they’re not really secrets, and to quote Vince Lombardi (alright, I am not sure he ever said this, but it sure does sound like something he would say), knowing something isn’t what counts, it’s actually doing it.

Connecting the dots, when it comes to doing it, I don’t necessarily agree with everything that Mr. Eisner is doing - I don’t understand most of it - but I do commend him for being one of the few - along with ourselves - who is producing video content instead of relying on skateboarding cats.  As I said all along: we’ve seen an underinvestment in video content and this probably explains why online video advertising estimates were reduced this year (before the subprime/housing/financial meltdown went into turbo).

Back to Mr. Eisner: one thing is for sure, he’s having a helluvatime funner time than his peers who stayed on in traditional media, considering the meltdown there.